Fast and low complexity method for content accessing and extracting DC-pictures from H.264 coded videos

A fast and simple method for content accessing and extracting the DC-pictures of H.264 coded video without full decompression is presented. Since DC-pictures are used in various applications such as compressed domain analysis or indexing of visual data, several methods for extracting DC-pictures of non-integer DCT codecs have been proposed. However, these methods are not efficient for the H.264 codec that uses integer DCT transform, which employs only shift and add operations and already has lower computational load than the non-integer DCT transform. In this paper we propose a fast and low complexity method to extract DC-pictures of H.264 coded videos with significant lower computational cost compared to its full decompression.